Journal of a Residence in Chile During the Year 1822: And, A Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823In 1821, Maria Dundas Graham sailed for South America on H.M.S. Doris, a ship sent to protect British mercantile interests in that volatile region. After her husband, the ship's captain Thomas Graham, died en route, the newly widowed Maria Graham landed in Valparaíso, Chile. Resisting all efforts to hustle her back to England, Graham, a professional writer and highly educated woman, rented herself a cottage in the Chilean--not the British--section of Valparaíso and traveled through Chile for nine months until driven out by a major earthquake and the threat of civil war. The resulting Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824) tells the gripping story of a gothic heroine in a dangerous but fascinating new land. The author has an eye for detail and a gift for storytelling, and so she creates a travel narrative with a compelling plot and vividly realized characters. Among the first travel narratives authored by a woman, Graham's Journal establishes literary strategies for travel texts to follow and shows clear differences from male narratives of the same period. The Journal, with Jennifer Hayward's illuminating new biographical and critical essays and appendices, is also invaluable for scholars and general readers interested in Latin America. Graham provides one of the few firsthand accounts in English of the independence movements in South America, meets with many of the major historical figures involved, provides detailed historical and political readings of events, and depicts Chile of the 1820s in accurate and loving detail. |
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... women rarely did so , but her visits coincided with the early days of South American independence and thus she provides invaluable firsthand descriptions of dramatic events and figures . As a woman writer and traveler , Graham stood out ...
... woman of her time and par- ticipated in the significant changes shaping and shaped by the lives of women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries . When Graham began roaming the globe in 1809 , few women traveled widely and ...
... women journeyed abroad , for reasons both professional and personal . These travelers were part of the new generations of women readers and writers made possible by hard - won political legislation , new technologies , and , perhaps ...
... ( women's powers are " no shrewder than our own " ) , bases her defense of women travel writers not on a claim to equality but on an assertion of difference , and constructs that difference as one of sensibility rather than achievement ...
... women travelers by the 1890s , Kingsley clearly feels the need to defend herself against potential accusations of deviance by creating a comic " odd woman ” narrator , one continually mock- ing and subverting her own status as explorer ...